I · will · only · accept · boundless · love

Originally published at Deadly Fredly. You can comment here or there.

I always like to get a day of recovery after travel. This past Sunday was exactly that.

Our morning started with a trip to Mayorga Coffee down in south Silver Spring. Christie had gone there a few times as part of one of her moms’ groups, and had nothing but good things to say about it.

Hm, make that almost nothing but good things. The bad thing was that it’s shutting down at the end of the year.

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Originally published at KIT KOW SKI. You can comment here or there.

Just as I suspected, I was about 10 minutes away from a big boss battle and major cutscene that basically set the game’s plot in motion, tying all the characters together in a tight party.

* The role system: Introduced about two hours into the game. Each character gets a number of “roles” which define their abilities. You can read about this elsewhere, but this system, and the mechanic of switching role loadouts in the middle of a fight, is the core tactical element of the game. Even more so than “firing fireballs at monsters weak to fire” or other ability-based stuff.

For example, there’s this wandering monster called “Barbarosa”, a kind of mechanical freak with a high damage resistance and tough attacks. If you just traded blows with it normally, it would take forever to take one down. You need to do enough combos on it to hit a “Break”, so that you can do double and triple damage on it. So in a small party (for example, an episode where you play only as Satz and Vanilla) you have to keep mixing up your Optima roles mid-fight: I start out with Satz:Blaster/Vanilla:Jammer in order to start racking up combos on the monster (Vanilla’s Jammer abilities make combos easier to rack up to the “Break point”), then after a round or two I switch to Blaster/Blaster. Then, when the monster hits its break point and I’m doing 200-300%+ damage, I roll over to Attacker/Blaster to finish off the creature. If I take too many hits I need to go to Attacker/Healer in order to recoup health while still keeping the heat on the monster.

All in all, not doing the right Optima (role) Changes can cost you a battle. Unlike other FFs, the little dudes you fight between one boss and the next are often pretty brutal. Not “Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne” brutal, but still pretty bad. Even though in this game you have the ability to restart the battle if you lose it (and not roll all the way back to the last save game), it can still be pretty tough. I got in one fight with 3 “Bombs” and 2 “Barbarosas”, and died about 7 times before I found a winning strategy. And it wasn’t even a boss fight.

* The levelling system: Kinda like FFX in two ways:
–It’s cool and pretty, and gives you the illusion that you have a lot of choices as to which ways to go with your characters’ progress, but
–In the end, you pretty much stay riding along the tracks the whole time, and the choice is kind of an illusion.
In FF-X International, a game released in Japan, they retooled the sphere system to make it really cool: They laid out the grids from scratch so that there was true choice and meaning in which direction you went. For example, at one point I opted out of Yuna’s mid-level heal spells in order to jump over to Lulu’s black magic path and ride it for a while, and it turns out that while Yuna didn’t have as many MP as Lulu, her black magic was far more badass at the same equivalent level. I did the same between Tidus, Auron and Wakka’s abilities.

In FF13, you level your characters by their roles, in kind of a similar fashion to the FFX sphere grid. So, for example in my current game, Lightning has the Optima roles of Attacker, Blaster and Healer. I haven’t used her for squat with Healing, so I pretty much am dumping all my XP into Attacker first, then Blaster. Each “node” of the leveling system again reminds one of FFX: “+4 physical damage” “+50 hp” “ability x” etc.

* Since the game has no random battles (yay!), and they even enhance that fact by some items you can use when you know a battle is coming up (”smoke” items to sneak past enemies, be stronger in the next fight, etc), I found that I’m not interested in avoiding combat. In fact, there’s one place early on in these ruins where if you search this wall, Lightning will find a path over a high wall, avoiding a switchback of about 5-6 small battles. However, I went back and fought all those battles anyway: Since there’s no random fights, and I’m moved to want to level up my dudes as much as possible, there’s really no incentive for skipping battles. In other words, they basically found a way to get rid of oft-frustrating random battles, but at the same time leave you some room to grind if you want to. I also notice that in the space of one map, if you travel a long way, then retrace your steps, the monsters will return.

* About 4 or so hours in, and they finally introduced one of the antagonists, Cid Raines. Apparently not one of the two main antagonists, and in fact it might be one of those cases where he acts all bad but later we find out he’s a good guy. Still, kind of interesting, as usually by now in other FFs the antagonist would have been introduced.

My theory is because in FFXIII, the antagonist is “The System” (like how in FFX, there was the humanoid antagonist Seymour, but in reality the main antagonist was the giant monster Sin). The strings of power that keep the Fal’Cie in almost godlike power with the ability to issue geas-es and control humans like puppets, the system that keeps the holy army and PSICOM in power and giving them the ability to rule the Cocoon and exile (”purge”) citizens to the hell-world of Pulse. So while there might be humans pulling strings somewhere, I bet before the game is over it’s all going to come tumbling down. It’s definitely racked up some Epic Sauce to be smeared all over the game.

* They introduced the second Shokanju/Summons, which was Lightning’s Odin: You summon him like a “Stand” from JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, and he whacks at dudes for you. You can also make him transform (yeah, all the summons are basically Transformers) into a Horse, and unleash all sorts of crazy attacks on the enemies for a short time, using a stick-button-combo-masher system that I’m just getting used to.

So far (since the last update):

Major Change: I thought Vanilla’s perkiness was totally dumb and out-of-place. Now, it’s totally grown on me, and they’ve dropped some serious fucking clues that there’s a storm underneath that happy exterior. Like she might have something to do with Everything, maybe. At least, there’s something going on that’s keeping her from sleeping comfortably.

Good/Impressed: Story is still cool. Setting is pretty gripping. Satz (”the black guy”) is a much cooler character than he looks at first, and is totally not The Comic Releif. Some of the protagonists that I was iffy on are shining. Non-linear timeline storytelling is in the hizzy, and so far it’s not done poorly. Battles are strategic and nail-biting, even on small frys (so while you heal all your HP between battles, and there’s no MP really to speak of, the small battles are far more brutal than any of the previous FF games: I’ve died far more times on 4-7 enemy encounters with small frys than I have on boss battles).

Bad/Not Impressed: Hope is still a whiny little bitch. I don’t like Shinji Ikari in my epic RPG.
However, having said that, a few events have happened which indicate that he wants to change, to grow stronger, to whine slightly less. I approve of that, and we’ll see what happens later. If things change, I’ll start adding spoiler tags or something.

For years, the city has been tapping power from Plain Jane, caged deep in the city's electrical system. But Plain Jane has escaped, and without her the city can't afford to power itself. It's slowly going dark, one block at a time.

No one has seen Plain Jane since.

The last generation of talents have all been taken out of the general population, to study or exploit, but a new wave of terrors stalks the night, doing Jane's bidding: Sentinel Crescent, who moves as fast as moonlight; Little Pig, who is as light as hay and as hard as bricks; Man-Bat, Sandstorm, and others.

The city needs you! But you have Bio homework!

*получить от дедушки Мороза настоящую душистую ёлочку уже.. душииистая *)
*чтобы хватило сил и желания на творение вкусностей к праздничному столу
*сугробы не тающего белого снега
*много-много душевных прогулок и душистых кафеин
*охапку нежных тюльпанов
*корзинку марципанок в шоколаде и трюфелей
*в новом году снова верить в чудеса
*смелости мечтать и чтоб мечталось не в холостую

photo by -Lagata-

A storm-of-the-century later, we're spending an extra day here at Megan's family's house. They've been extremely hospitable during the whole incident, but I worry about driving on the curves and hills around here when we head back tomorrow. Looks like there's only a three-hour window in which we can enter the city while the weather is above freezing.

And on top of that, I hear the snowplows are only hitting heavy routes so neighborhoods are still impassable. So we could make the five-hour trip back home only to be stuck a few blocks from our house. :P

I know a lot of you are still stuck in OKC, so I'm just hoping everyone's safe and warm. We'll be joining you soon for next week's snow!

Originally published at Deadly Fredly. You can comment here or there.

So, common gaming question: if we had superheroes in the actual world, what government agency would regulate them?  If you’re from the United States like me, your first answer is probably The Department of Homeland Security.  But that’s too pat and too boring of an answer for me.

So I’m looking to head in another direction, one based on something that I think Rob Donoghue cooked up for a supers game once (though it might have been Matt Gandy).  I don’t remember much about it, other than the idea that the folks with superpowers were regulated by (and in several cases, employed by) the Food & Drug Administration.  Now that’s something that has legs, because the FDA is a weird choice, and it forces you to sit and think about what that choice means for the nature and origin of superpowers in your setting as well as the politics of regulation and oversight that got things stashed there in the first place.

So let’s go back to my original question, and turn it on its ear: starting with a particular government agency as the body of regulation, what’s the reason superpowers exist in the world, and what form do they take?

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London, Dec 25 (PTI) In yet another medical achievement, British scientists have restored eyesight of a partially blind person using pioneering stem cell treatment.

God bless us, every one.

Originally published at KIT KOW SKI. You can comment here or there.

It arrived yesterday! So last night Orie and I dug into the latest episode of the Final Fantasy franchise. Just note that in these posts I won’t be posting “spoilers”, I’ll be breaking down the basic story elements, framework, gameplay, etc.

So, last night I played for a little over 2 hours, and I still appear to be in “the prologue”. The reason I can tell this is because they have not yet introduced any XP/levelling mechanic. Because of all the other changes in the game, I thought “My god… have they actually done away with the core mechanic of every console RPG? That’s kinda scary, and a bit intriguing…” but then I looked in the instruction manual and sure enough one is there, I just haven’t gotten to when it’s introduced yet (probably pretty soon, though, given the action that’s happening in the story).

Mind you, some of the below info is going to reflect the fact that I’m only 2 hours into the game, it might change as the game goes on.

* You don’t control your party of 3 members: You only control the lead character in your party, and the others perform support roles. Also, and this is new: You can revive other characters in your party, but if your leader goes down, you cannot revive them: It’s Game Over. So you’ve got to keep the leader alive no matter what.

* Potions: Use one single potion, and everyone on your team is healed.

* Restart: If you don’t like how the battle is going, you can hit Start->Select to choose to retry the battle from the beginning. I actually did this in one mini-boss battle: I mistimed the damage my companion was taking, and he went down. I could have dropped a Phoenix Down to bring him back up, but I figured “Why waste it?” and restarted the battle.

* No XP! …at the beginning, anyway. As I mentioned above, you later get XP in the form of crystals or something as explained in the manual. But I’ve been playing for about 2 hours, and 3-4 separate characters as leaders, and I’ve been yet unassailed with levelling mechanics. Incidentally, I’ve also been able to skip a bunch of low-level fights to get to bosses by simply running past them. As having whined about the frequency of random battles and low-level grinding on previous titles, this is kinda refreshing. But I’m just probably about 20 minutes from the next section when that stuff is introduced.

* Combat Roles: Haven’t been introduced either, but will get to those when the game brings them up, again probably after not too long.

* Characters: Already more memorable than FF 12. I’ll break down previous games later, but in short FF X had memorable characters. FF 12 had totally forgettable characters, who I referred to in play as Boy, Girl, Princess, Good Twin, Han Solo and Fran. Fran is the “bunny chewbacca”, and I only remember her name because she actually had some cool backstory. Anyway, even though they go a cheesy route of naming most of the characters after English words (Lightning, Snow Hope, Vanilla(for real?), etc), the characters seem memorable enough in their own rights.

* Treasure chests are floating metal spheres with hand-recognition stuff on them.

* The story: They are doing a real job of In Media Res with the action, and the story setting/background as well. I’m not sure what the fiction writing/word is for it, when the author doesn’t introduce you to the world but rather throws you in and you pick up on the meaning of the special words/terms/etc used in the world through inferrence… This game does that in spades. I’m 2 hours in and finally getting the lay of the land as per what’s going on, and why everything is fucking exploding. But we’re still a little unclear on what Pulse (the “Underworld”/下界), Cocoon (I figure it’s the techno-world of green-and-black that the game starts in), the Falshe (ファルシ), and the Rushe (ルシ). Huh.

* The women in this game are too damn thin. Lightning and Vanilla need more meat. I’m reminded of Late Buffy’s Sarah Michelle Gellar, and I want Lightning to pop a potion and a pack of almonds or something. As the Japanese say,”gari-gari”/looks like a skeleton.

* All of the weapons fold up. A fold-up sword, fold-up huge boomerang, fold-up laser-whip-staff (!!!), etc. That’s very efficient!

* There’s a techno-magical explanation for the “1-mile anime jump/anime fall”, which was kinda cool.

* The Intro/Prelude song is really cool, too.

-Andy